Two rifles under the counter. The sheriff's 22-gun raid only adds up to 21.

The rifles were under the counter.

That is where sheriff's deputies say they found them at Brouge 24/7, the Davis convenience store owned by Noah Gutierrez. Not in a locked bedroom. Not buried in the inventory from some unnamed stash house. Two rifles, beneath the same counter where the store conducted business with the neighborhood.

By the end of the operation, the Los Santos County Sheriff's Department said it had served five warrants, arrested three people, seized at least seven fully automatic weapons and broken into an alleged drug-trafficking network spread across Davis and Legion Square. Then the department published a press release that could not count its own evidence.

The January 11 headline announced 22 firearms and a half-kilo of narcotics. The evidence paragraph announced 21 firearms and approximately 650 grams. Somewhere between the department's headline and its inventory, one gun disappeared and 150 grams arrived.

The raid began two months earlier on Brouge Avenue. Narcotics detectives and Operation Safe Streets investigators identified four properties connected to Gutierrez and an apartment in the Charleston public-housing complex that they suspected was being used as a trap house. Detectives from Narcotics and gang units went in with the Special Enforcement Bureau, crime-impact teams, canine units and state parole officers. All five warrants were served at once, before people or evidence could move between addresses.

The department named Gutierrez and Derek Carrillo as suspected participants in a larger criminal network operating as a street gang. Carrillo was arrested at a residence during the searches. Gutierrez was arrested the next day in Hawick on allegations including drug trafficking and aggravated firearm possession. Genesis Turcios was arrested during the operation after deputies said she had a pistol. Additional affiliates and conspiracy charges were described as pending but left unnamed.

Those are allegations awaiting their day in court. The rifles beneath the store counter are the department's own location-specific claim—and the sharpest fact in the case. Brouge 24/7 was not merely another pin on a warrant map. It was an operating neighborhood business that deputies say kept long guns within the commercial space. The release does not say who placed them there, who handled them or which employees knew.

Everything else in the evidence pile floats between five locations. The department does not say which address held the narcotics, where the seven automatic weapons were recovered or what investigators found inside the Charleston apartment. It gives the public a citywide total without the property receipt that would connect each weapon, bag and warrant to a door.

That missing receipt is also where gun No. 22 ought to be. Perhaps it was counted after the narrative was written. Perhaps a weapon was classified differently. Perhaps the headline was simply wrong. The Sheriff's Department has the evidence sheet and supplied none of those explanations.

The same problem follows the narcotics. A half-kilo is 500 grams. The department's evidence paragraph says 650. The larger figure would make the seizure more substantial, not less, which leaves no obvious reason to advertise the smaller one except that nobody reconciled the release before publishing it.

Five simultaneous warrants and seven automatic weapons already make this a major operation. Two rifles beneath a convenience-store counter already make it a Davis story. The Sheriff's Department did not need to inflate either fact. It needed to get the count right.

If the department wants credit for 22 guns, it can start by showing the public gun No. 22. Until then, the official record says 21—and the rifles under the counter remain the part of the story nobody can misplace.